MAURO EM CAIENA

Mauro, is the uncle who emigrated illegally to French Guyana and whose silhouette sometimes reminds the young filmmaker’s mother of her son’s. “The strange uncle, away for such a long time that he says things strangely”… Surely, absence, rendered formally here by the absence of colour and countershots – has never been more doleful. In this film-poem, the intended addressee of the discreetly epistolary voice-over is, of course, absent but so too are the friends already “carried off by new opportunities”. The shores of adulthood are decidedly deserted, and childhood’s landscape – Fortaleza, in Brazil – is itself in deep turmoil. Science fiction with its obvious special effects seems to echo the filmmaker’s horror at the almost unreal aggression of urban reconstruction, just as disaster films were there to make up for the lost vitality of a childhood landscape suddenly snatched away. The editing cuts from the far-off uncle to a young cousin, whose mouth filmed very close up takes on Godzilla-like proportions… (Charlotte Garson)